


Babysitting

by Purrs



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Bab David, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-11-15 20:18:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11238432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Purrs/pseuds/Purrs
Summary: Wherein the Animorphs are far too busy saving the world to have time for this blond six-year-old with light-up sneakers and a certain blue box,or,AU where David is a tiny. 'Nuff said.





	1. Marco

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jace_Diaz_Of_Hell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jace_Diaz_Of_Hell/gifts).



So I'm hanging out with Jake, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias, right outside a Burger King. As one does.

You know, chilling, eating burgers, waiting for our robot friend Erek to get here so he could fill us in on how the world is in terrible danger this week. The usual.

This car pulls up, like any other car, and a family gets out, like any other family. A mom, a dad, a kid, maybe six, maybe seven, playing around with the blue piece of game-changing alien technology in his hands.

They go inside. My friends and I freak out. They order food. We continue to freak out. They come out with their food and sit down at a table. We pretend we aren't still freaking out.

Erek finally shows up. Apparently the heads of state from six different powerful countries, including the good ol’ US of A, are coming to town. The Yeerks want to take advantage of this opportunity to get a friendly little body-snatching slug inside each of their stately heads. One of them's already infested, and we don't know who. And we only have a few days to deal with this.  _ And _ the kid still has the blue box.

Yep. Just another casual afternoon with friends.

~

So we send Tobias, our resident bird, to follow the family home and find out where they live. Get the box, if he can. Meanwhile, the rest of us chat about how, exactly, we're going to foil the Yeerks' nefarious scheme.

Tobias comes back. Good news: he knows where the family lives. Bad news: when he was looking through the window, he saw the dad putting the box up for sale on the Web. Just our luck.

Except for Erek, we all ditch our food, make for the bathrooms like we're gonna hurl, morph birds, and book it to the house. On the way there, we're overtaken by a whole fleet of cars going the same place we are, because sure, maybe eagles and hawks are faster than cars when diving, but in horizontal flight, no dice. We make it just in time to see a blue alien deer ring the doorbell, with like twenty scythe dinosaurs on his tail. We’re almost too late. Turns out we’re already too late to save the dad, who opens the door and gets a tailblade to the neck for his troubles. I’d grimace, but I have a beak at the moment. We divebomb one of the windows, hopefully where we won’t get spotted straight-out. Visser Three starts talking at the dad, broadcasting his thoughtspeech far and wide without a care in the world as to who hears him. I have a bad feeling about what’s going to happen to everyone in the area. Well, that’ll be a mission for another day, if it comes to that.

Meanwhile, we’re wreaking full-on havoc in the house. What the family has to look forward to is awful, but things will be so much worse if the Visser gets the blue box before we do. Speak of the devil, he notices us. Yells at the parents that they’d better go get the box - turns out it’s called an “Escafil device” - then starts morphing something. It’s purple. Like Barney the Dinosaur purple. And he’s getting pretty big. Jake, Tobias, and Rachel focus on Tall, Purple, and Nasty. Me and Cassie are right behind the parents. Most of the Hork-Bajir are right behind us. The rest stay to fight with the Visser. Fight alongside him, that is. Our jobs would be a lot easier if the Yeerks started fighting each other. It would also be great if Ax were here, but this is all kind of last-minute here.

Into the hallway. Crash. Through a door on the right. Crunch. The dad opens a drawer, and there it is. A noise that can’t be summed up in a single word - a this-house-is-probably-missing-at-least-one-wall-now sort of noise. Hopefully the others are doing okay. Or at least better than we are.

I make for the device. The Hork-Bajir are too quick. It’s hard to maneuver with tail feathers that are suddenly half as long. Cassie moves in. Talons right in the eyes. My hero. I tell her that. She doesn’t appreciate it. I take down a few of my own. Cassie takes down some more. They clip her wing. The parents are screaming. They’ve been screaming for a while. I try for the blue box again - score!

Time to leave. I tell the parents to run for it. I’d like to help more, but we really need to get out ASAP, while we still have the box and the Visser still doesn’t. I tell my teammates that in private thoughtspeech. Me and Cassie flap as best we can out of the room. We head toward the window we came in, but we don’t need to bother with that. There’s plenty of space to leave through. Not as much house.

~

We regroup at Ax’s scoop. He missed out on all the action, so Cassie and me start filling him in. The rest of us show up pretty soon. Jake’s still a bird. So is Tobias, but that goes without saying. Rachel, though, apparently took the time at some point to demorph and morph into a horse.

Oh, and she’s got the kid on her back.

Why does she have the kid, I ask. She says his name’s David. She says they couldn’t leave him. I get it. I really do. But now this kid’s seen some of us human - me and Cassie for sure, Rachel probably. He’s a huge information risk, I say. Jake says it’s not like we’re planning on handing him over to the Yeerks. Well, of course not, I say. But what if. David contributes half a pint of snot to the conversation. Cassie says what, am I saying we should off him? I’m not saying that, I tell her. We argue for a while. I’m skeptical, Ax is skeptical, the two of us are outnumbered.

We’re taking responsibility for the kid. For now.

Which is great, because between us we obviously have  _ amazing _ childcare skills.


	2. Jake

We already have more than enough on our plates with the war, but now we owe it to David’s parents to take good care of him. This means dividing our responsibilities. I work out a schedule - we’ll watch him in pairs. Me and Ax, Marco and Cassie, Rachel and Tobias. I would put Ax and Marco together, except that neither of them is a fan of this whole thing.

A few days later, most of the team morphs bird again and heads to the Marriott resort, where the Middle East conference will be taking place. I’d like to be there with them - I’m already getting tense and they’re barely out of sight - but it’s my and Ax’s turn in the rotation.

Even though Ax has his reservations about David, David loves Ax. He’s taken to shoving grass at Ax’s hooves and watching as the first part of the Andalite digestive system does its work. Ax is even pretty okay with it. That is, until David tries the same thing with snails, and then with rocks. He gets a hoof to the chest. He spends the next thirty minutes sulking, and then: I want a ride, Jake, he says. I want a ride the pokey-mon.

Don’t ask me, ask Ax, he gets to decide, I say. Pokey-mon, can I ride you? David asks. Ax narrows all four eyes. That’s extremely rude, he says. No. But David starts clambering over Ax before the Andalite finishes. David stands on Ax’s back, grabs his eyestalks, and tugs on them. Giddyup! he yells. Ax jerks, then carefully places his hands on David’s. That is not acceptable, he says, do not do that again. He tries to uncurl David’s hands from around his eyestalks. But David, as a human kid, has a strong monkey grip. Ax doesn’t. But Ax does have a tailblade.

I get up in David’s space and he lets go on his own, pouting. I grab him under his arms and heave him off of Ax’s back, then set him down by a tree maybe twenty feet away. You hurt Ax, I say. Think about what you did. Then apologise.

I walk back to Ax. He says he won’t do this again. I say that isn’t fair to the rest of the team. He says we should give David to someone else. But anyone we tried would either be a Controller or realise it’s the missing kid and give him to a Controller. Right? Ax is quiet for a bit. He says what about the Chee? Right, I say.

I stay with David while Ax morphs harrier and flies off to Erek’s house. David’s upset that Ax is leaving. I go for my rhino morph, kneel so David can get on my back. He cheers up fast. And it’s not like he can do much damage to me.

Ax comes back with Mr. King in tow. I get David off my back and demorph. Apparently the Chee are cool with taking David. Ax looks human now, but far enough away from Mr. King and he’s suddenly back to being an Andalite. That’s holograms for you.

We walk to Mr. King’s car. He unlocks it and gets in. We put David in the back. They leave. That’s that. Ax starts doing his Andalite smiling-with-his-eyes thing.

Mr. King comes back fifteen minutes later. David gets out of the car, eyes red and nose runny. He sneezes and starts coughing. Dog allergy.

Ax isn’t eye-smiling anymore.


	3. Tobias

It’s been a few weeks since we acquired David. We’ve settled into a routine, sort of. He stays at my meadow - Ax won’t let the kid near his scoop anymore. I can sympathize. He caught me off guard and pulled out a solid third of my tail feathers the first time I was on David-watching duty. Rachel yelled at him for an hour. He hasn’t done it again.

David doesn’t like Rachel very much.

So he stays with me, and I keep an eye on him at night, with Rachel’s help when she can sneak away. We set up a tent for him - Marco swore his dad would never notice it was gone. They haven’t gone camping in years. Jake brings most of the food David needs, though Cassie and Rachel chip in. His parents think Jake’s eating it all, that it’s a teenager thing.

It’s not night right now, though, and Marco and Cassie have David. Her parents are out, so the three of them are at her barn. I’m relaxed, enjoying the thermals. And then I feel these pricks of sharp pain. They’re small, but they _hurt_. Hurt like Dracon beams. But, you know, smaller. One on my chest, one on my right wing. I loop around, trying to see where they came from. Nothing on the ground. But a couple yards away, a bit below me, I see them. These tiny… well, spaceships. And they’re shooting at me again.

Jake, Rachel, and Ax... and... Marco and Cassie? I’d believe it of Marco, but I can’t see Cassie ditching her responsibilities like that. Are they leaving David by himself? Anyway, they come in their assorted bird morphs to help, and we get the ships fleeing. We’re dealing with Helmacrons, apparently, whatever those are, and they’re after the Escafil device. And they have David. Cassie says he thought one of the ships was a toy, started messing around with it and smashing it into things, and got shrunk for his trouble. _Shrunk_. (Marco, helpful as always, says good riddance.) So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t manage to take down either of the Helmacron ships.

We get back to the barn just in time to find them making off with the blue box. Jake rams one of the ships. The box falls to the ground. And then they shoot us with a different kind of beam and shrink us too.

Everyone else is taken prisoner aboard a ship. I can still fly, so I escape. I morph bat - small enough compared to a hawk that I can get around without being too obvious, but not so small that I can see individual cells or something, like I’m worried would happen if I went fly. Then I sneak on board. Someone has to find David.

And find him I do. He’s talking with a group of Helmacrons. Weirdly enough, they’re listening to him.

“- need to listen to those dumb girl Helmacrons anymore. Girls are poopyheads, all of them,” he’s saying. “They have cooties.”

<Oh? What about Rachel?> I ask.

His head whips around to look at me. "Rachel’s a poopyhead too," he says, jutting his chin out, and the Helmacrons start yelling “Neep! Neep!”

<Yeah, I dare you to say that to her face. Come on,> I say. <Let’s get you out of here.>


End file.
